


Please Ink...

by murderofonerose (atmilliways)



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Gen, M/M, Metalocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 20:58:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15057668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atmilliways/pseuds/murderofonerose
Summary: Skwisgaar Skwigelf, tattoos lots of trees.Toki Wartooth, flowers and bumblebees.William Murderface, Murderface, Murderface.Pickles the shop-owner, tattooodily doo. (Ding-dong, tatoodily, tatoodily doo.)Nathan Explosion!





	1. Impulsively

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It started with seeing [this art](https://you-lady-skwisgaar.tumblr.com/post/174960262106/you-lady-skwisgaar-floristtattoo-artist-aus-are) on tumblr, then I was talking about it with [little_murmaider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/pseuds/little_murmaider), then some writing happened.

It wasn’t long before Please Ink Responsibly was scheduled to close, and Skwisgaar had just finished his last appointment for the day. He was packing his stuff up for the night when the bell above the front door jingled and didn’t even bother turning around to look. 

“Hey, Skwisgaar, ya dooshbag,” Pickles called a moment later, “can you take this guy?”

The tall blond groaned. “I don’ts does walk-ins, Pickle, you knows that,” he complained. 

“Yeah, well... do it anyway!”

Groaning again, Skwisgaar dropped his bag and swung around to glare, making a rude gesture at the man who was, technically, his boss. Pickles didn’t appear to notice, though; he was too busy squinting in concentration over a work-in-progress sleeve of a metal snake couled around the arm of one of their regulars. Whatever, Skwisgaar told himself. It was probably just some dildo from the local junior college down the street who’d come in for something small and lame out of the books of standard designs that littered the front counter, which usually meant not a lot of work for the minimum price. But still, only twenty-seven minutes before closing time? Some dick had a lot of nerve. 

With a huff, Skwisgaar sauntered up to the front of the shop and gave the new arrival his best get the fuck out of here look... but found that this prospective customer was almost as tall as he was, which made it harder to look down his nose at him. A teenager, probably, or just a little older, but already built like a pro American football player and damn, as far as glowers went it looked like he could give as good as he got. Skwisgaar, who’d spent years honing his air of superiority, was mildly impressed. 

Not that that meant he was going to be nice. 

“Ja, whats you want?” he asked bluntly. 

The young man’s frown deepened. “Uh... I want a tattoo.”

Skwisgaar raised an eyebrow. “No shits. Whats does it want its to be’s?” Sometimes people walked in without really knowing what they wanted, and if that was the case here he could probably get away with keeping the kid flipping through catalogs until it was reasonable to say there wasn’t time, come back later. 

But instead, the kid shrugged his backpack off one shoulder, fished around in it for a moment, and pulled out a notebook with a beat-up black leather cover. He dropped I on the counter and flipped it open to a particular page, then gave the book a little extra push towards Skwisgaar and jabbed at a drawing. “I want that. Exactly that.”

At first glance Skwisgaar thought it was a crude drawing of an anatomical human heart, with irregular hatch marks drawn in both pencil and sharpie rendering it mostly black. Then, upon stepping closer and taking a closer look, he realized it was actually a dragon. It crouched on the page, raised slightly on its hind legs, and the... big arching artery thing on top, that was its spined neck. The hatch marks were actually scales and the more irregular patches were wickedly sharp teeth and claws. 

“Who am the guy what draws this?” Skwisgaar asked, admiring the crude elegance of it. 

“I did.”

Again, Skwisgaar was impressed. The composition, the clever shading, the bold lines, all of it was well-suited to be adapted to ink on skin. His eyes flicked up to the young man’s face — or what he could see of it between the falls of longish, unkempt black hair, anyway. What he saw was absolutely serious, absolutely sure, the look of someone who’d actually put a great deal of thought into what he wanted. At the same time, Skwisgaar had been doing this long enough that he knew the signs to look for in spotting a tattoo virgin. 

The decision was sudden, and surprised even him. It meant giving up on his plan of hitting the local bars for some between-the-sheets entertainment. Skwisgaar had never made such a sacrifice for a walk-in before, but his fingers were itching to pick up the sketchbook and flip through it, see what else was in there. 

“Okays,” he said, “how bigs and where does you wants it?”

In the background, the guy that Pickles was still working on snorted softly and mumbled that’s what she said under his breath. Skwisgaar rolled his eyes — his first impression of Magnus had been ‘not as clever as he thinks he is,’ and so far the man had done nothing to change his mind. But, as Pickles said, all he needed to have to be welcome here was cash. 

“About... this big.” The kid held up a clenched fist. His hands were pretty big, but Skwisgaar figured that was about the size of an actual human heart, more or less. “And right here.” He thumped his fist against his chest, slightly to his left. 

Skwisgaar nodded approvingly, but the majority of his attention was still on the sketchbook. Now that he had accepted the job he chanced to put a hand out and touch the page, and when the kid didn’t protest he picked it up to look more closely at the drawing. 

“What ams your name?” he asked, almost as an afterthought. 

“Nathan Explosion.” 

That didn’t sound like a real name, but when Skwisgaar took his id to scan a copy for the shop’s records it didn’t look like a fake, and he’d seen enough to feel confident in that assessment. 

“I gots to make the templates now,” Skwisgaar told him. “You can waits wherevers as long as you amn’ts in the way, ja? Oh, and, bys the way...” He grabbed one of his business cards and flicked it expertly down on the counter in front of the kid. “I ams Skwisgaar Skwigelf. You gots lucky, I don’t takes just anyones and I ams kinds of a big deal.”


	2. Studiously

_SEVERAL YEARS AGO_

Skwisgaar only met Charles Offdensen because a professor paired them up for a class project. He sized him up and came to the conclusion that Charles, several years older and bespectacled and very serious, was the type to shoulder any slack in an effort to still get an A on the assignment. That was good, because Skwisgaar was getting a D in the class so far and could use the boost, but he didn’t actually have enough ambition to get it by, you know, actually studying or anything.

He did _not_ expect Charles to actually show up at his house the next day, expecting to actually get work done. For one thing, he hadn’t even given the guy his phone number or email, let alone his physical address. 

“Are you fuckings serious? You can’ts just fuckings _shows up_ at places,” Skwisgaar hissed as he hustled Charles back out to his car before Servetta saw him... Sometimes he suspected his mother had only insisted he enroll in business school so she could hit on his more successful peers — which managed to take first place in his embarrassment hall of fame, just ahead of how shitty their craphole apartment was.

“I’m very serious,” Charles replied stubbornly. “You have to put _some_ effort into this, at least for the, ah, oral report.”

Skwisgaar winced. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the professor explained the assignment, and public speaking wasn’t amongst his strengths. Had Charles ever shared a class with him where he had to do one of those, or...?

“And I’ve seen you try to present reports to a class. I’m not prepared to, ah, risk my GPA on this.”

Apparently yes. Skwisgaar groaned and gave his classmate a push towards his car. “Fines, _fines!_ Let me gets my stuff, we can studies at your place.”

The car ride was awkwardly silent. Charles was just the kind of guy who didn’t automatically reach for the radio, which Skwisgaar found incomprehensible. If _he_ could afford to have a car of his own instead of riding the damn bus to school every day, all silence would be eradicated by heavy metal blasted through all available speakers.

Studying with Charles turned out to be just as boring as a car ride with him. The longer they tried, the more frustrated and monosyllabic Skwisgaar became, until Charles finally snapped the textbook closed. There was a frown on his face, but it wasn’t the expression of someone about to give up and shoulder the workload himself — which was what Skwisgaar had been aiming for. No, here in his own very practical and neatly kept apartment full of second-hand but perfectly serviceable furniture, Charles seemed to be in his element, more in control than before. The almost-stutter of pauses and _ah_ ’s had lessened, and he looked, in fact, like a man prepared to tackle a difficult yet interesting challenge.

“What would help you concentrate on this?” he asked. “What do you usually do while the professor is lecturing?”

Skwisgaar shrugged, nonplussed. “I don’ts knows.”

“Can I see your notebook?”

Reluctantly, Skwisgaar handed it over. He always had it with him in class, always had it open while the professor droned on about risk management and investing or whatever, and he did take _some_ notes... Mostly, though, he doodled. On each page a sparse collection of words was encroached on by a thicket of sketches, winding and twining and overgrowing the margins to take over most of the available space.

Charles flipped through that for a moment, then put the notebook down and looked at Skwisgaar over the top of his glasses like a damn librarian. “So... I’m, ah, guessing that most of the material goes in one ear and out the other?”

Skwisgaar could feel his face heating slightly as he shrugged noncommittally. It wasn’t his fault, he wanted to protest. He had never _wanted_ to go to business school, but his mother had scraped and saved and enrolled him anyway, and never let him forget that he was why they couldn’t afford a better place to live. In Servetta’s opinion, she had made her investment in him and by the gods it was going to pay off in her old age.

“Okay,” Charles said. He gave Skwisgaar a thoughtful look. “What do you want to do with your life, really? Because it’s not business.”

It was as if the guy had read his mind. Skwisgaar, somewhere between startled and weirdly grateful, blurted out, “I wants to be the world’s greatest tattoo artists!”

“Hm.” Charles opened the notebook again and seemed to examine the sketches more closely. “Have you ever practiced? Drawing on a person, I mean.”

An hour later, Skwisgaar was sitting cross-legged on the couch facing Charles’ back, using a permanent marker to fill the reaching branches of a massive tree with dark, thick foliage. His classmate had handed him the marker and gave him some very simple instructions: don’t draw anywhere that would be visible with a shirt on, and pay attention.

And it was working.

“That was good,” Charles told him after Skwisgaar’s most recent attempt at reciting his part of the report. “You’re starting to sound more natural.”

“That ams because I thinks I kinda gets it nows,” Skwisgaar replied, a hint of amazement in his tone. “You would makes a good teachers, anyones ever tells you that?”

Charles shrugged, and the drawing of the tree rippled slightly as if caught by a breeze. “Yes. I could’ve paid my way through undergrad just by charging for tutoring. But that’s not what _I_ want to do with my life.”

“What does you wants to do?” Skwisgaar asked.

He found, to his surprise, that he was actually curious. That never happened. Typically, he floated through life in a haze of apathy, and the only thing that made the clouds thin was being free to draw or paint — a solitary exercise that didn’t encourage a lot of connecting with other people. When he connected with other people, it was usually by having sex with them. Bodies, he’d always thought, were much more interesting than the random collection of thoughts and feelings that lived chaotically inside them.

Charles glanced over his shoulder at him. The massive World Tree that Skwisgaar had drawn on his back stretched the full length of his spine, branches and roots stretching in either direction to take up as much “canvas” as he’d been allowed. And Charles had good skin for it, smooth and unfreckled and firm with underlying muscle.

“I want to be a lawyer,” Charles told him.

Skwisgaar’s mouth twitched into a smirk. “The world’s greatest lawyer?”

“Ah, sure.”

The next week, they got an A- on their presentation. A few months after that, Skwisgaar dropped out of business school to start an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlor owned by some crazy, pot-smoking redhead he’d met at a bar.

 

* * *

 

_SEVERAL YEARS LATER_

If he was being honest with himself, letting Nathan move in with him had not been high on Skwisgaar’s list of priorities. He hadn’t had a roommate since he’d moved out of his mom’s place, and very much relished his privacy. But Nathan wasn’t very good at keeping jobs and the burger place down the road had finally fired him for general incompetence and he couldn’t afford his own apartment... and Skwisgaar had found himself offering his spare room to the kid. After all, if Nathan had to give up on independence and move back to Florida to live with his parents, Skwisgaar would lose access to his dark and twisted imagination that churned out such powerful imagery. He paid a commission whenever he used one of Nathan’s ideas for a tattoo of course, slightly bargained down for now in lieu of rent.

The thing was, on more serious projects where they really had to talk over how to best translate a particular sketch onto a human body, Skwisgaar had started to find he actually enjoyed the collaboration. It was like when Pickles had first started teaching him how to tattoo. There was a certain wavelength that Skwisgaar functioned best at, and both Nathan and Pickles were capable of tuning in and matching it. They were, for want of a better phrase, his best friends.

Nathan had just texted to let him know he had a decent shot at getting a job in some coffee shop nearby, which meant _actual_ rent money in the near future, when the bell over the door jingled. Skwisgaar glanced up, totally not intending to actually greet the person or anything — they had hired some gap-toothed idiot to do that these days, because nothing scared the riffraff off like being sworn at and sprayed with spittle at the same time — but he caught sight of vaguely familiar glasses and paused for a closer look.

“Hey Charles, ams that’s you?” he called.

Charles gave an awkward little wave. The man looked basically the same. Hairline a little receded, maybe, and a few more lines on his face, but other than that...

Willy, up at the front counter, spun around and glared suspiciously at Skwisgaar. “You know thisch guy? Scheriouschly? He’sch wearing a _schuit_.”

“Ja ja, says it don’t sprays it,” Skwisgaar shot back, striding up from his work station at the back of the room. “I haven’ts seen you in years,” he said to his old classmate, the first person to ever encourage him to go for the career he actually wanted. “What brings you to’s a place like this...” He raised an eyebrow, because Willy did have a point about the suit. There was even a tie. “...Dressed like that?”

“I, ah, just came from work. I’m a lawyer now.” He held up a sleek briefcase, then to the surprise of both men watching he put it on the counter and opened it with a click. From it, he produced a manila folder full of papers, which he held out to Skwisgaar.

Immediately, Pickles was at the counter too. “Hey mister lawyer dood, I’m the owner here. If you’re serving the place with a lawsuit or something, you gotta give that to me.”

“Ah... no, it’s not a lawsuit.” Charles looked flustered. “I, ah, just brought in some, ah, references that I wanted to talk to Skwisgaar about. For a... potential tattoo idea.”

Willy snorted loudly. “ _You_ want a tattoo? Gimme a break...”

Discretely, Skwisgaar kicked him in the shin. Or it would’ve been discreet if not for the idiot hopping around clutching his leg in exaggerated pain and cursing a blue streak at him. Skwisgaar and Pickles just ignored it in favor of the folder’s contents.

“This is all your work, innit?” Pickles asked Skwisgaar.

“Ja,” Skwisgaar replied absently, flipping through the prints of various pictures. There were sleeves and chest pieces, big tattoos and smaller ones, some that fanned out and some that knotted in on themselves. For anyone else it might have been hard to spot the connection between any of them, let alone all, but he knew at a glance that these were all projects he’d collaborated on with Nathan. He glanced up at Charles. “There ams a lot of stuffs here… Do you know whats you wants, or you just like the styles?”

“The second one,” Charles confirmed. “I saw them and… Well, I asked around. Someone gave me your card, so, ah, here I am.”

It was still flattering, of course. Sure Nathan came up with the concepts, but Skwisgaar was the one who made them a reality, embellished a little here or there, and made sure each tattoo came out absolutely perfect. He decided to take his former classmate’s sudden appearance as the compliment it was.

“All rights, I have some times before my next appointkints,” he said, waving at Charles to put the folder away and come around the counter. “Come sits back heres with me and looks at what I haves.”

“Dood, you think he’s going to be a custom job? And maybe really big?” Pickles murmured excitedly. He didn’t wait for Skwisgaar to answer, just drifted off with dollar signs in his eyes back to the customer he’d been working on before the interruption. They needed up upgrade some of the older equipment, and Charles definitely looked like he could afford to sponsor that.

What Skwisgaar had was, essentially, pages from Nathan’s sketchbooks in a three ring binder of plastic sleeve protectors. He tugged an extra stool over for Charles and handed him the binder, then settled down to start mixing the colors in preparation for his next appointment. As he did so he commented, “You seems to has done pretty wells for yourselve."

“I was going to say the same thing,” Charles replied with a reserved smile.

“And… I seems to remembers you saids way back thens that you didn’t thinks you wants a tattoo. Somethings about it was ams too pourminents?”

“I did say something like that, didn’t I?” He turned a page, studying the drawings intently. “I don’t know, I could never, ah, picture anything I’d actually want. Your drawings were always very well done, of course, but they weren’t quite my style. But when I saw these… and especially when I found out you were the one who did them, it just, ah, seemed like a sign.”

Skwisgaar mixed an extra dab of blue into a very pale shade of indigo. “So this ams to be your first tattoos, huh mister bigs lawyer mans?”

“Yes, why?”

“Just wonderings if you ams still not the types to shows it offs, since I couldn’ts sees any,” he replied with exaggerated innocence. Then, after a moment, he added, “Virgins, heh.”

Charles glanced up at him over the top of his glasses and replied, dryly and with a very, very faint smirk, “Bold of you to assume.”


End file.
